:focal(960x549:961x550)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/b6/ca/b6cada46-c092-4fe2-8c88-d4b30b9841d4/51548866865_0802a42ef8_o.jpg)
Geoscientist Sian Proctor (left) and physician assistant Haley Arceneaux (right) aboard the Inspiration 4 mission, a three-day sightseeing trip into Earth orbit in 2021. Photo of Inspiration 4
More and more humans are traveling into space. Several missions have taken private citizens on tourist flights in 2021. Last month, six people flew to the edge of Earth's atmosphere and back. NASA plans to send astronauts back to the moon in 10 years' time, and SpaceX recently tested a rocket that it hopes will one day take humans to Mars.
With even more ambitious manned flights on the horizon, scientists want to better understand how the stresses of space, like exposure to radiation and weightlessness, affect the human body. Now, the Space Omics and Medicine Atlas (SOMA), a collection of 44 newly published papers and a trove of data, aims to do just that.
SOMA is the largest collection of data ever on aerospace medicine and astrobiology, exponentially increasing the amount of information about how the human body changes during spaceflight, and the initial research resulting from the project will improve scientists' understanding of the effects of space travel on human health.
“This will allow us to be better prepared if and when we do send humans into space for any reason,” Allen Liu, a mechanical engineer at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the project, told Aditi Ramakrishnan of The Associated Press.
The new atlas is based in large part on data collected from four members of the Inspiration 4 mission, a space tourism flight that sent four private citizens on a three-day trip to low Earth orbit in September 2021. The findings suggest that people on short-term flights experience some of the same health effects faced by astronauts on longer trips into space.
“We still don't fully understand the risks of long-term space travel,” Amy Maguire, a biomedical ethicist at Baylor College of Medicine who was not involved in the study, told Science's Ramin Skiba. “That's why it's so important that early space travelers are included in the research.”
Space travel poses many risks to health. Without the protection of Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field, astronauts are exposed to space radiation, which can increase the risk of cancer and degenerative diseases. Weightlessness can cause fluids to shift to astronauts' heads, which can lead to impaired vision, headaches and changes in brain structure. The microgravity environment can also lead to reduced bone density and muscle atrophy, requiring long-term astronauts to adopt special exercise regimens.
But in addition to these known risks, new research highlights other potential problems. One study published Tuesday in Nature Communications found that mice exposed to radiation to simulate a round-trip trip to Mars experienced kidney damage and failure. If not protected from this radiation, human travelers might need to undergo dialysis on the return journey from Mars, writes The Guardian's Ian Sample.
“This is likely to be a serious problem,” study co-author Stephen Walsh, a clinical scientist at University College London, told the journal. “It's very hard to say whether it's going to be OK.”
The health information from the Inspiration 4 astronauts sheds light on how space travel can affect the general public, who may not be well trained. The findings also shed light on changes that can occur to cells and DNA during short trips into space.
Biomarkers that were altered during the Inspiration 4 mission returned to normal several months after the flight, suggesting that space travel poses no greater risk to civilians than to trained astronauts, Christopher Mason, a geneticist at Cornell University who helped compile the atlas, told New Scientist's Claire Wilson.
The Inspiration 4 study also suggests that women may recover from space travel faster than men. According to The Guardian, data from two men and two women on the mission, as well as data from 64 NASA astronauts, found that gene activity related to the immune system was more disrupted in male astronauts, and that men's immune systems took longer to return to normal after returning to Earth.
Taken together, the new papers could help researchers learn how to mitigate the harms caused by space travel, study co-author Afshin Beheshti, a researcher at the Blue Marble Space Science Institute, told The Associated Press.
And scientists say there's nothing in the data to suggest humans shouldn't go into space.
“There are no catastrophic failures,” Mason told The Washington Post's Joel Achenbach. “There's no reason why we can't get to Mars safely and back.”
We'll send you the latest news by email every weekday.
Categories: astronauts, health, mars, nasa, new research, space travel
Source link
